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PLANET LEARNING

OLE Hagadera Implementation Site at Dadaab Refugee CampPlanet Learning is a generic learning system that is designed to be adapted to a diversity of challenges facing nations and their communities. It has been used to improve early education, secondary schools, village health, youth workforce development, and economic and community development.

At the core of the Planet Learning system is a repository of free, open access and public domain resources to benefit all learners.

The platform has two components:

  1. an online cloud-based repository for managing learning content and aggregating user metrics, and
  2. a community server that delivers learning resources, courses, and learner management tools to a local area network.

Planet Learning is designed to be available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. It is portable, affordable, scalable and sustainable. It is hardware agnostic; any device that can open a browser can use it. It functions off, as well as on, the Internet. The Raspberry Pi, costing US$35. is often used as the server.  It can easily be powered locally by batteries and solar cells. The complete system, tablets, server, battery, camera can be contained in a small wheeled suitcase, or backpack, moved from one location to another, up and running in less than a minute.

 The low cost mobile servers we employ enable schools and communities to have a complete multi-media library and learning system that periodically connects with the Internet. Planet provides learners with their own personal dashboard. They have their own personal bookshelf and links to the courses in which they have enrolled. They are encouraged to rate, one to five stars, the resources they use and the courses they take. Periodically the manager of the program syncs the server to an online server that connects with several communities. Activity data are uploaded and new resources are downloaded in a matter of a few minutes each week.The community server runs in standalone mode providing access to open learning resources and courses that are multimedia and multilingual. The system provides each learner with a personal dashboard that holds the resources they have chosen to read and the courses in which they are enrolled. It will run on any operating system including Linux, Apple OS X, or Windows.

Plant Learning System InterfaceThe dashboard also contains: a record of achievements, a calendar of events, and an internal email system for communicating with coaches and fellow members.

The community server also includes data collection widgets that can be used to gather a number of usage indicators. Activity reports are aggregated by gender and age and detail members use, the number of resources opened, the names of the most frequently opened resource, and member resources ratings. This anonymous user data is available to anyone with access to the management side of the system.

Planet Learning has been proven highly effective in improving learning opportunities for over fifty thousand learners in more than 100 locations, in schools  throughout Nepal, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda, with Syrian refugees in Jordan, Somali refugees in Kenya, and village health workers in Uganda.